Adding new sections to Visual studio 2015s team explorer

Question

I'm trying to write an extension for visual studio 2015 that adds new UI features to the team explorer window.

Visual Studios 2013 and 2012 had a standard way of doing this (Implementing the ITeamExplorerSection interface), which no longer applies to 2015 from what I can tell.

What, if any, is the new way of extending the team explorer in VS2015?

Answer 1

I myself have been looking for documentation on adding a team explorer extension, I found some documentation here , however it is targeted to 2013. The main differences are the first part of the tutorial using the wizards as they have changed, but everything in there needs to be done.

Also do yourself a favor and download the VSSDK2015 instead of using nuget, trust me on this one, it created no end of issues for me, probably from my understanding.

The next issue you will run into is finding the dll's you'll need to reference regarding Team Explorer, just do a search through your visual studio directory. Also I believe that there isn't a 2015 specific client for TE, so use the 2013 version.

Another issue I ran into is that when you create the vsix project you will need to run VS as admin, because it wants to sign the vsix. After creating the project you can be a user. I just "unsigned" it too at this point also.

Your going to add a Page and then a section, in the page you load your section. That's the gist of it.

Using the TeamExplorer.Common project from the GitFlow project really helps.

Edit: A more direct answer would be to decorate a class that implements ITeamExplorerSection with: [TeamExplorerSection(section_guid, page_guid, importance)]

where:

• section_guid is a guid defined in your package
• page_guid is the guid to the page you want to show the section on
• importance is a number that gives you some control over where its shown on the page, 100, 200... any number will do, lower numbers are higher on the page